mccApr 21, 2023

The biggest thing missing from Mastodon remains the ability to *actually* migrate an account between servers.

The follower-migrate feature is not enough. I need to be able to migrate an entire account, including posts. And I should be able to do it without the former server cooperating (because of course servers can go down). I should be able to get some sort of cryptographic cert I can send to a new server with my posts and they'll be like "oh yeah, this is real, migrating u now".

Show threadmcc

If this feature existed, I'm not sure I'd make use of it! Maybe I'd decide m.s deserves on its own merits to be my server.

But if we had this feature, actually had it, quite a lot of other potentially problematic elements of the fediverse— especially the ones related to a network overemphasis on mastodon.social— would no longer be a problem.

I don't know *when* I expect this featureset to exist by. It sounds kinda hard. But it *needs* to exist eventually.

Apr 21, 2023 at 10:44pmWeb
Show threadErinApr 21, 2023

@mcc I think I'd almost certainly move off of mastodon.social, though I don't know to where.

Probably the "right way" to choose (for me anyway) would be checking my own outgoings against "did this message get invisibly discarded because mastodon.social was blocked" and then finding a server what ain't blocked.

Show threadit's B! Cavello 🐝Apr 21, 2023

@mcc yeah, I haven’t formally migrated because I’m not prepared to lose access to all my old posts, but being on a new server has also made me feel the gaps in the mastodon model in another way.

I used to ignorantly from my mastodon.social account encourage new fedi users check out unusual hashtags to find friends, but now that I’m on a smaller server, I’ve found that there are barely any posts that show up in searches, even for common stuff like #FashionHistory!

Show threadbobApr 21, 2023
@mcc it's not hard on a technical level, tls has everything you need to do this, but there's an incentive problem
Show threadbobApr 21, 2023
@mcc if you wanted something that didn't require support from the server you could do it for peers that were following you already, and I think that's actually sufficient. do a special post with your public key and when you migrate send a special signed DM to everyone who followed you
Show threadRidley @ WATCH LYCORECOApr 21, 2023
@mcc this is one of 3 core problems mastodon has IMO; the other 2 are:
- no universal way to link to a post in a way that lets you actually interact with it (could be solved either with a centralized "this is my instance" service, which in theory wouldn't even need to store anything server-side, or a web browser API addition)
- no large-scale cross-instance search (maybe eventually third-party crawlers like google will fill this void, but nothing other than twitter was ever much good for searching tweets…)
Show threadvalApr 22, 2023
@mcc Yeah it would probably be pretty hard. It may even need changes to AP for other instances to see the moved posts (because their URI has to change), but even if they don't all support it, it's still better than nothing